Next Thursday, I'm going to be chatting with linkarzu about Emacs and life. He's more of a Vim person than an Emacs person, so I'll try to share things that are generally useful. He's called it: "Why Sacha Chua Still Lives in Emacs After 20+ Years."

[2026-10-29 Thu 08:00] (America/Toronto, -0400) = Thu Oct 29 0800H EDT / 0700H CDT / 0600H MDT / 0500H PDT / 1200H UTC / 1300H CET / 1400H EET / 1730H IST / 2000H +08 / 2100H JST

I am not sure my eyebrows have ever done that, but linkarzu does like his thumbnails, so we'll let that pass. =)

It turns out that I've been using Emacs for at least 25 years, which is pretty cool. I put together some sketches to help me organize my thoughts. His channel uses dark mode, so let's experiment with dark mode in my sketches too. I'll probably need to do a brief introduction to set the context so that people know where I'm coming from. Let's disclaim my professional irrelevance up front.

Image text and links

About me 2026-10-24-03

• sachachua.com (since 2001 :) )
• Emacs News
• planet.emacslife.com
• EmacsConf
• Where: Manila, Philippines to Toronto, Canada in 2005
• Now:
  • Continuing with hanging out with A+ (kiddo) and W- (husband)
  • Experimenting with retirement
• Previously: web prototypes, data analysis, sketchnoting, computer science
• Currently tinkering with: learning French, hybrid speech interfaces, community sharing

Here's a brief overview of my history with Emacs.

The details are a little bit fuzzy, but fortunately I've written about some things in previous blog posts. I'd like to flesh this out with an outline and maybe even some sentences or paragraphs later on. I love the way that different themes recur. I find myself building on things that I started exploring years ago. For example, my current interest in hybrid speech interfaces echoes all the way back to M-x doctor and Emacspeak from the beginning.

• M-x doctor:

  • From "Unix Power Tools":

    If you have time to waste (and I mean really waste), Emacs has things to keep you occupied. … If you think you might be in need of a psychotherapist, save your money and try ESC-x doctor RETURN.

    I was not actually looking for a psychotherapist. I think I was seventeen or eighteen, and I was trying to go through all the interesting computer science books in my university's library in the Philippines. I thought it was funny that someone put in that kind of Easter egg. The more I dug around in the source code, the more I was amazed by the things that people had added to Emacs. Anyway, it's interesting how the fun, inconsequential stuff turned out to be the thing that caught my attention.

• Planner Mode: How I got hooked
  • I loved seeing how people customized Emacs in so many different ways to fit the way that their particular brain worked, and getting it to fit my brain too.
  • One time, when I was the maintainer of Planner Mode, I got an email from someone who said something like: "Thank you for maintaining this. By the way, one of your recent changes lost my data and I didn't have any backups, but that's okay, just please fix it, here are some ideas." That kindness mattered a lot to me.
• Emacspeak:
  • In my third or fourth year of university, my laptop screen started glitching. Sometimes it got really low in brightness and contrast, and you could only read it if you tilted it at an extreme angle and looked very carefully. But the Emacspeak folks had figured out how to make it perfectly usable just with speech synthesis, because they needed that as blind or visually impaired users. This turned out to be pretty handy. I not only used that for a fair chunk of my regular writing and coding, but also for my experiments with wearable computing, and for the occasional alert when I was paying attention to something else. Speech synthesis was a lot more discreet than the head-mounted display that I experimented with in 2003.
• flashcard.el:
  • The fun part about this was rigging up my flashcard.el so that it would show me funny cat pictures from ICanHasCheezburger when I answered enough questions correctly. Fun matters.
  • Japanese flashcards
  • More Emacs evangelization: flashcard
• ledger:
  • Keeping (financial) score with Ledger
  • My financial network map and virtual envelope system
• Org Mode: New note-taking workflow with Emacs Org-mode
  • I started using Org Mode as part of research for a book on Emacs. I didn't finish the book, but I stuck with Org Mode. I like the way it fits the way I think and what I want to do.
• Work: Drupal, Rails, blogging, data analysis, literate programming
• Semi-retirement:
  • What did I learn from this experiment with semi-retirement?
  • Continuing my experiment with (semi-)retirement
  • category - experiment
• EmacsConf
  • I helped organize the first one in 2013 in London. I watched the 2015 one remotely. Amin Bandali reached out to me in 2019 to get EmacsConf going again, and we've been organizing it yearly since.
  • Analyzing my Emacs time over the last 11 years or so
• Emacs Chat
• Parenting:
  • Braindump from radiostudent.si interview with Lio Novelli and Jurij Podgorsek: Emacs, focused time - parenting, using fragmented time
  • Orgzly Revived helped me stay sane by capturing ideas and making it easy to postpone them for years.
  • Incremental improvements in fragments of time
• Emacs News: Great way to see all the cool things that people are working on
• Captions: I can even use them to edit videos and audio files in Emacs
  • Editing subtitles in Emacs with subed, with synchronized video playback through mpv
  • category - subed
• SVGs:
  • EmacsConf backstage: scheduling with SVGs
  • Visualizing the balance of speaking in my French conversations with tutors
  • Using Emacs to visualize speaking and target words/phrases in real-ish time
• Minecraft:
  • The kiddo wanted to play Minecraft, but she wasn't comfortable enough with typing yet, so I made her some command books so that she could just click on things in order to teleport back to us or give herself equipment. Now she can type very quickly, but it was helpful back then.
  • Updating my Minecraft command book using Emacs, TRAMP, and mcf.el
  • Using Org Mode tables and Emacs Lisp to create Minecraft Java JSON command books
• Rubik's cubes: (not in the graph, but another example of building on the kiddo's interests)
  • Using Org Babel to learn Rubik's cube algorithms
• Streaming
• French, LLMs
• Speech: speech recognition, speech synthesis, hybrid speech interfaces
  • M-x doctor demonstration
  • Emacs Carnival Oct 2026: Exploring keys and voice input in Emacs

linkarzu mentioned wanting to talk about artificial intelligence. I don't know nearly as much as lots of other people do. Maybe I can just share the things that I've been experimenting with, and also what I care about from a community perspective. I would like to help figure out how to deal with this turbulence and come out the other side happier.

Text from sketch

Large language models and other things 2026-10-24-02

• Y'all know much more than I do. You have more at stake.
• Me: tiny steps, using it for tightly scoped tools
  • grammar/fixing literal translations, explanations
  • troubleshooting
  • prototypes (ex: Python servers)
• Next:
  • help people who want to connect and experiment
    • human-focused
    • LLM-assisted (only if you want)
• Keep exploring what I'm curious about: experiments > hype
• Yay:
  • more people learning about and customizing things
  • more capable local models
  • adding up fragments of time
• Boo:
  • flood of slop, "content", spam
  • overwhelmed developers
  • centralization
  • polarization
  • externalized costs
  • non-deterministic